coldzera: "We're trying very hard, but the team just isn't fitting very well"

We caught up with MIBR's Marcelo "⁠coldzera⁠" David after the Brazilians beat their Luminosity countrymen, 2-0, to stay alive in the lower bracket at the ESL Pro League Season 9 Finals.

MIBR had a rough start at the ESL Pro League Season 9 FInals in Montpellier, losing to Finn "⁠karrigan⁠" Andersen's men on Inferno, 8-16. On the second day of play, in the first round of the lower bracket, MIBR beat fellow Brazilians Luminosity in a two map series that was played out on Mirage and Dust2.

In the interview, coldzera talks about the state of MIBR currently, what they're suffering from and what they need to turn the ship around, and touches upon some of the keys in the their first two matches in Montpellier, against MOUZ and Luminosity, and what would be a good result for the team at the event in France.

It's the second day here in Montpellier, you started out with a loss to mousesports on Inferno, were you expecting it to go the way it did?

We practiced a lot of Inferno for this tournament because we know it's one of our weakest maps. During practice we tried to create new things and we were really comfortable, but against mousesports it was tough. We have a good T-side, and we knew all of the aggressive plays they have. During the match we tried to counter them a lot, but during some of the rounds that we should have countered them because we knew what they were going to do, we didn't counter them. Someone would push somewhere and we would forget to counter them, like when we were up 6-2, I told my team that mouz had a forcebuy, like $4,100 or $4,200, so they wouldn't have much utility and would do the same aggression they always do. They did it, but we didn't have an answer for it and after we lost that round it started to get in our minds a little bit. They're a new team, and they're playing really well, but I think we need to find ourselves. We're not playing our game, we're not playing our best, we lose a lot of group stage matches. We're trying very hard, but the team just isn't fitting very well.

Talking about group stages, ECS was a rough exit. You started the season traveling a lot, but you had some time at home before that and it seemed like you could travel there refreshed. What's going on in the team right now?

Right now the problem inside the team is not about strategy, or about aim, the problem is that when we come to play, and we'll do some aggressive setup, the players on the other side of the map don't understand that they need to play safe, they'll try to fight more and when they die we start to create a lot of gaps in the map, so we start to lose map control. For example, against Luminosity today we created a setup to fight for Mid, but felps was trying to fight on Long and when he died we lost that part of the map. They knew we had a huge gap and it was hard to regroup again and try to fix that mistake. We have a lot of those situations and that's the problem for us right now, it's not that we play poorly because we don't play anymore or that we're not hungry to win, we're trying to do everything and fix our mistakes, the problem is that we don't fit together because people don't understand when we need to fight together or when we need to play safe.

What do you think you can do now to try and fix that, especially now going into the final bit of the season ahead of the Major?

People need to understand the game better because nowadays it's not about just playing. Everyone knows how to play, how to shoot, the teams that are playing well now are the teams that play smart, teams in which the players always try to make the correct play and don't gamble anymore or fight a lot. ENCE are a team that fight more, and then play normally, but if you look at FaZe or Na`Vi, they play around someone and they know what they're doing, so when they pick a fight, the players on the other side of the map are very defensive. We're trying to add this to our team and open the players' minds to understand that part of the game better.

You're going through the lower bracket now, you just beat Luminosity and had to make a bit of a comeback on Dust2. Can you run me through the key moments? Did you expect to have to struggle like that?

It's always hard to play against Luminosity, it's difficult for us to play against teams that YOLO a lot, every time we play them it's a tough match. We played well on Mirage, and we know what they're going to do there, but we're not very good on Dust2 right now, we're trying to fix it. Luminosity play everywhere, they move a lot, they never play a normal game and if you lose fights against them they abuse the gaps a lot, and on Dust2 when you pick a fight you leave a lot of gaps.

Mirage was kind of easy, but on Dust2 they play fast and abuse the gaps, and when we started to lose a lot of fights that made a difference because they knew how to use those gaps really well and when they abused them we started to suffer.

Moving on to the lower bracket semi-finals, what do you expect to get out of this tournament moving forward, or what would you consider an OK result?

After losing to mousesports yesterday, I don't think we're ready to go to a semi-final, a good result for us will be to get out of the group stage and start to go step by step again, trying to fix our mistakes every match and to try and understand how to play as a team better. So getting out of the group stage in this tournament would be good for us.